


I and my Annabel Lee

by Primtal (Primzahlen)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Death, F/F, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Magical Realism, Magical Realism-esque, Medication, Original Character Death(s), Shock, Suicidal Thoughts, Therapy, Thwarted Happiness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 05:41:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4467497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Primzahlen/pseuds/Primtal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Margaery receives notice of Sansa's death in the army. 'Devastation' does not do the situation justice; she feels she has lost most of what she was. </p>
<p>(I was a child and she was a child,<br/>In this kingdom by the sea,<br/>But we loved with a love that was more than love—<br/>I and my Annabel Lee—)</p>
            </blockquote>





	I and my Annabel Lee

The worst thing was that it was flowered paper. And scented. The person in charge of sending off letters of condolence to spouses of deceased soldiers must have had a whimsical sense of horror. Margaery stepped over the letter, which had fluttered, half closed, to the ground. It looked like an ignored tax receipt. Margaery was glad it looked that way.

She hadn’t brushed her teeth yet today. It was imperative that she brush her teeth. When she reached the sink upstairs she threw up in it. She wished she had carried the letter there so she could have seen it floating in her vomit. Then she fell down on her knees and stayed perfectly perfectly still. So perhaps the universe, not noticing her, would erase Margaery, Margaery with eyes dry and blank, eyes dry and blank.

Margaery managed to find her room after a few hours. Everything was disorientating,  She made the phone calls. They were easy, but she wished they would stop talking back. She wished they could stop crying.

Topsy Turvy.

She fed Lady. And watered the plants. She did all the Saturday chores until she couldn’t. Until she was lying in her bed, wondering whether she was grateful or not that she didn’t have to remember to breathe.

Turvy Topsy.

. . . . . . . .

_A consciousness is first a cloud as children. Amorphous and fluid and moldable. But soon come the first few layers of mortar, stiffening it into shape. New layers are added as time passes. New designs, new scenery, new crevices. New sites to explore and sites to avoid. Partners take each other’s consciousness in hand. They move forwards with it, learning to accept the sharp angles and appreciate the patterns. Maybe they sandpaper one off, maybe they add their own. At the end they have even been known to take a large mallet and strike, reveling in the new baby crack._

_Sansa’s and Margaery’s could not be compared to this. As children they had woven theirs together; beautifully, complexly, irrevocably. They’d watched theirs settle with joy, noticing how Sansa’s was mostly kept inside Margaery’s, extending the latter’s out in new directions with the pride of an accompanying circus assistant. Margaery’s wrapped around, jealously treasuring. And preserving. The special folds wherein the two souls met hidden from hostile eyes._

_So many pointless patterns, so much surface area that would never again be touched. Margaery wrote, years laters, about being a shell._

_She was not being entirely figurative._

 

. . . . . . . .

It took a month for her body to allow her to cry. It was when she’d noticed, for the seventh hundred and twelth time, that this house was a macabre museum of their union. But it was the first time she’d realized that’s what she was, too.

Her entire form had postponed this moment for as long as possible, believing in vain that the emotions, closed off, would have started nursing each other into wellbeing. Have at least formed a layer of defense, even if just a sprinkling of the consistency of shredded wheat cereal.

Must that, with broken words, be answered?

Some have compared loss to a flood. To Margaery it was the vaporization of bones. And a replacement with howls.

She cried in bed for a month.

. . . . . . . .

_Margaery and Sansa’s union as children had been catalyzed by a flaw. Not mental or physical, or even societal. It had been architectural._

_Both, by chance, had come from families of noble names that had been impoverished by the tides of history . They had found themselves in the same long, rippling building. Their two families’ adjoining flats had cost just little enough, partly also owing to the aforementioned flaw. This was, in fact, a window._

_Not a window one expects, serenely or pretentiously leading to a view. But one placed between the two flats, opening from the bedroom of one to that of the other. The landlord’s first few attempts to board up this terrifying glitch always seemed to end with disaster. A broken ankle, an epileptic fit, a minor earth tremor.  Inevitably one of the workers had uttered the word ‘fate’. ‘Haunted’, ‘necessary’, ‘the will of God’ quickly followed, and that was that. No one would ever dare try to alter that mutation of a window again._

_It was through that flaw that Margaery had first smiled at Sansa._

_It was wide enough for theirs to be one magnificent room instead of two isolated units. High enough for them to stand up in completely, until the age of fifteen, when shenanigans became of another sort entirely. Thin enough for them to tirelessly shift their beds over against the adjoining wall every night, so as to be able to hold hands throughout it._

_Sansa’s future was Margaery-shaped, and Margaery’s was Sansa-shaped._

_In time, their minds saw the window that joined them adopt those forms as well._

. . . . . . . .

Margaery was an existentialist. She knew this as she watched the knife, so thin and lithe. In her dreams in that third month a balloon artist once took one and fashioned it into a key.

The meaning that her life lacked by divine purpose she’d always resolved to outdo by forging her own. She, not chaos, would have the last laugh. As a very small, frighteningly precocious child this had meant power and ambition, what else could satisfy more truly in this mortal realm? At six, already it meant something more specifc; Sansa.

She had fostered Sansa’s dreaminess and righteousness as her own, had been fleshed out in the other girl’s hunger for justice, truth, beauty.

Margaery placed the knife on white linen. Distantly it occurred to her that, swathed in her blood cells and in that same position it would look almost … poetic. Like a fittingly grand ending couplet.

She remembered when she’d humored Sansa when they were fourteen, when Sansa had asked ‘What is happiness?’ Sansa had been playing with Margaery’s hand at the time.

‘It’s three syllables’ Margaery had first answered. Sansa had managed, as she sometimes did, a disapproving grin.

‘It’s three fifths of the first line of a haiku’ Margaery had tried a second time, and waited a moment ‘or of the last one.’ Sansa had then launched on top of her, throwing her onto the bed and proceeding to tickle Margaery.

‘Fine fine, I beg of you to stop.’ Sansa did. Tangling her fingers with Sansa’s, Margaery had stated simply ‘It’s you. Only you.’

A second passed as Sansa had seemed to think over this properly. They had known, that for both of them, this would always be the honest answer. Something about Sansa’s expression had seemed to indicate, for the first time, that perhaps it wasn’t a good one.

The knife was still sharply appraising Margaery.

One knifesecond.

Two knifeseconds.

Three – Margaery let out a loud sob and picked up the phone.

_Help._

. . . . . . . .

_Sansa’s and Margaery’s union had been all-fulfilling._

_They could not understand the concept of sexual or romantic orientation. The idea of anyone else’s touch, whatever the gender, was perverse to the extreme. What happiness was there to be stolen from another lumbering body that wasn’t so precisely and perfectly in tune with their own?_

_Often they polarized their desires, siphoning them off into each other. Entities and identities their playground._

_Margaery had done all the talking while they had crowded their two families into a single room, announcing their engagement. These smiled at the thought that the pair believed them obtuse enough not to have seen, since the beginning, something bizarrely, surreally special. Sansa grounded her through their arms._

_Sansa sometimes took both of their righteousness and fed it into speeches of practical morality._

_Margaery harvested both their curiosity and dove into learning the intricacies of the universe, lab goggles a portal into new expanses of thought. It mattered not that it was she doing so. What one of them knew so did the other._

_And Sansa had decided to fight for both. Only for two years. Only at minimal risk. Only because it was necessary and only because they were fierce and only because they’d written a long list of weighted reasons that could not be quelled._

_Sansa had looked at Margaery questioningly, and Margaery had traced consent onto Sansa’s body with her tongue._

. . . . . . . .

Therapists were called. Pills were prescribed. In small, safe, amounts of course. She wasn’t to be trusted.

 The tiny cylinders tottered high on Margaery’s mantelpiece. They were of a much higher moral ground, too. Unlike her, they would never have fallen off the shelf , would never have entertained the call of the void.

They insisted that she continue her Phd. ‘You must return to more familiar daily environments.’ ‘You must carry on.’ ‘You must start to see this as a world of new possibilities.’

So she returned to her lab and picked up her goggles. They were now bars in her cage. She made calculations, she handed in a report and her supervisor read it.

‘It’s great in its scientific accuracy. You’ve carried all of it to perceptive logical conclusions.’ He tapped the report reprovingly ‘ But it seems to lack a certain expansiveness, a certain grandeur and fervor that it used to have. To be frank, your research seems much narrower and unimportant now. Where did that innovation go?’

Margaery stood still for a few seconds. Until she was sure she would not, like a thin brittle ice statue, fracture when she moved.

Then she stood up . ’That, I’m afraid, was never mine.’

. . . . . . . .

_Sansa visits back to Margaery from the army always started the same way. The pair would clasp at each other, and not speaking would plunge into their bed. They placed their foreheads on each other’s, and entrenched their fingers into each other’s, maximizing their contact where possible. And lay there for hours, absorbing the other’s essence, updating their internal consciousness._

_Then came the laughter, as they giddily giggled into each nook they could find on the other’s body. Not marking, but re-delighting in any imperfection, re-finding hidden memories lodged into every crack and stroking them out._

_Here I am, they would think._

_Whole._

_Let the sky, jealous,  echo our joint melody._

_Of I and my Annabel Lee._

. . . . . . . .

Margaery pressed flowers on her tombstone, which had been christened with her tears. She wouldn’t have described this as either a hello or a goodbye. Simplifications, for her and Sansa, were obscene.  

For a moment she closed her eyes, and tried to pretend she could feel Sansa’s consciousness climb into her own, as it had done so many times.

Her eyes opened.

_My love_ , she thought.

_You’re gone._

And she left,  for the first time not pausing to  read the words etched onto Sansa’s tombstone:

_And nothing can ever dissever  my soul from the soul,  
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee._

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Annabel Lee - Edgar Allen Poe.


End file.
